Teacher‘s Role as a Counsellor

4.3. Situations that can be met by class masters 
Counselors agree that class masters may take action at a classroom level in order to prevent certain situations, 
with this aim identifying and understanding the causes being primordial. There are notes according class master’ 
intervention in classrooms, which reduce the number of cases that finally reach the specialty counselors’ attention. 
Other notes emphasize the fact that class master call a counselor’s intervention only in severe situations, which are 
part of the above mentioned cases. 
“Class masters can do support counseling, becoming emphatic towards the emotional and familial 
problems that some students tell them, trying to understand the reasons which found their base of some 
students’ emotional disorders and their deviant behaviors.” 
Communicating with students represents, according to counselors, the key factor of the relation between 
class masters and their students, and approaching the aspects which refer to group cohesion, self-knowledge, 
reducing violence, class communication represent a starting point in preventing a significant number of problems. 
4.4 Collaboration between school counselors and class masters 
 
The relation between teachers and school counselors manifest, according to the school environment, at a 
more superficial level (class masters appeal to counselors only in situations that overcome their abilities) or more 
profound (class masters and counselors work closely with the aim to prevent and solve difficult situations even from 
early signs). 
“These ask for my free support in most situations, but, only if they are convinced of the complexity of the 
problem which appeared and of the fact that it is beyond their competences and ability, their didactic 
cadence needed to solve this.” 
“Some class masters consider that they might lose their authority in front of the students, if they would give 
up objectivity and would not sanction behaviors that are against regulations, group rules in which they are 
installed and depute the task to understand motivation behind these behaviors to me, the school counselor, 
also in my task coming the search for an individualized personal program to remedy the situation 
experienced by that student, or group.”
“It would be ideal a permanent, proactive collaboration to exist, from the counselor’s part as well as from 
the head teacher’s in order to solve situations, cases that appear, but, in practice, it does not always 
happen like this, some class masters assume more of the counselor’s competences, some gives the latter 
responsibilities that would have been of him”. 
“Collaboration with class masters and with teachers from the classes in which there are children with 
certain difficulties is essential. As well as collaboration with parents is. Some class masters still have the 
feeling of self-sufficiency, considering themselves able and they end up at the counselor’s private practice 
in worst moments together with the child or the parent.”